Removal of Dock Items

[#1]

Hey Group,
I am having a brain fart here. What the easiest way to remove dock items?

Thanks
LC

[bentoms]

add them to casper admin > then scope a policy & select remove instead of install at beginning/end i think.

[#3]

You were right, thanks

[tlarkin]

You can use composer to build user environments and push them out, or use MCX

[#5]

Tried that, but that pesky Mac App Store and FaceTime keep showing up with a
big old question mark.

Thanks
LC

[#6]

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup.plist

Remove the entry for the AppStore or like I did, just remove the whole file.

Nick Caro Senior Desktop Support Administrator

[#7]

That would work also, just plan to remove the dock icons.

LC

[#8]

When do you have this set to run? I set it to run at startup, but it is
getting a permission denied.

LC

[jonscott]

Is that plist needed at all for anything else? Can you add the entry for AppStore to the remove-file dict?
Just not sure how to best do this via Casper MCX, though I'm already removing the dock item for the AppStore.

[#10]

I personally have not seen it as a vital file for anything else. If you look a the other entries you may or may not have iLife apps as well in there.
In our environment, we are still bound to OD so we are unable to use JSS/MCX, so I have blown out this file manually/ongoing with policy.

I say ongoing cause we have many admins on our network and anytime they run an OS update it replaces the AppStore and the dockfix.

Sorry I can't help with the JSS/MCX side of this.

Nick Caro Senior Desktop Support Administrator

[#11]

Hey Nick,
If you don't mind can you share how you wrote the policy. This is kicking my
tail.

Thanks
LC

[#12]

Sure, I can break it down.
*I'm sure there is a much, much more elegant way of doing this via JSS/MCX but here I'm using "Canal St. methods"

First we have a smart group and its members are defined by: Application Title has "App Store"

Then there is an ongoing policy that is scoped to only the App Store smart group and runs with the every 15 trigger
That policy runs a simple two line script and updates inventory
#
rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup.plist
rm -rf /Applications/App Store.app

Nick Caro Senior Desktop Support Administrator

[#13]

I expect that file can be useful if you ever need to do some Dock fixups of your own. Migrating from Office 2008 to 2011, for instance, or from CS4 to CS5.

[golbiga]

As long as you have the dock icons in casper admin you can just run the command
/usr/sbin/jamf modifyDock -id <dock_item_id> -remove

On my image I have a Defaults folder that has desktops, dock setups, bookmarks and some other plists (Composer). During the postimage script it moves those files into their proper location.

I also run in that script /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "delete:add-app" /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup.plist and that will remove the App Store from the dock.

Allen

[#15]

Well, I must retract a comment I made here in the past.
While setting up a test Lion image, I went ahead and made the same changes described in the thread by removing the AppStore and deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup.plist
Well, once I did that and rebooted I lost ARD connection to the unit and we had some odd issues over all. The unit will accept SSH connections but will not allow ARD control. Not an issue with JAMF components cause there are none on this unit.
Been able to replicate the ARD issue and able to fix it simply by replacing this file with a good file from another Lion unit.

So, long story short;
In the past I have said that there is no issue with removing this file and now in Lion this is no longer true.

Nick Caro Senior Desktop Support Administrator